Umbrella Loofie
I am grateful to my elementary school classmates, who listened attentively to the stories I wrote using our assigned spelling words, although maybe they just wanted to avoid learning math. The heroine—a young, single bookworm named Umbrella Loofie—helped the sheriff solve crimes in the small Western town where she lived. Rather than rely on guns or rifles, Loofie used her wits, and occasionally her umbrella, to foil any evil-doing.
My indulgent parents and generous-minded sisters also put up with my earliest efforts, enduring for example the one-act play, Wild Bill Hiccup, whose concluding punchline was admiringly borrowed from a Peanuts cartoon.
While the influence of the Westerns that dominated the television and movies of my youth has long faded, I hope that such juvenilia foreshadow a developing sense of humor, as well as a continuing interest in the lives of women and a desire for a socially just world.
Early indoctrination in the arts
My mother, Ann Cleveland, passed on her love of the arts to my two sisters and me. While we were growing up, she made many of our clothes and taught us how to sew and knit. She produced scores of oil and acrylic paintings, and was always taking classes in ceramics, china painting, watercolors, and other media.
Mom had a creative streak that could be disconcerting—for example, when she ran out of tomato sauce, she would pour a can of alphabet soup into the lasagna she was making. It was jarring, although somewhat entertaining, to find alphabet letters, green peas, and little carrot cubes swimming between the layers of noodles and cheese. Other times, her creativity was somewhat frightening—such as when she tried to cut carpet squares using Daddy’s band saw.
In public, my quiet father, Bill Cleveland, was the model of the respectable business professional. He exemplified many qualities of the Eagle Scout designation he had earned as a young man growing up in the North Carolina mountains. He served in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s and then worked for Burlington Industries for thirty-five years. Throughout his life, he provided extensive service to church and community and had appropriately high expectations for his daughters. In addition to all of this upstanding behavior, my dad fortunately had a predilection for practical jokes, humorous ditties, and groan-worthy puns. I fondly remember his pounding out a boogie-woogie version of “Sentimental Journey” on our piano or strumming the guitar while belting out “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?”
Rose Ann Cleveland 